Emergent computation in semitotalistic cellular automata: applications in character segmentation

An innovative method of character segmentation is introduced based on emergent computation in simple cellular automata systems. It is shown that the nontrivial function of character segmentation and recognition can be performed with a low computational complexity. This provides the basis for a compact VLSI circuit implementation of a robust intelligent sensor, which can be used in a wide range of applications (e.g., remote OCR or license plate recognition).